The Weight of Blood

by Laura McHugh

  “Now, why do you always assume Birdie made it if it’s good? I can cook.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I’m just joking.” He smiled and patted my leg. “Of course she made it. There’s buckets of it in the deep freeze; it’ll last us through winter.”

  I looked down into my bowl, wondering if that was true. Would we be here together in this house, eating Birdie’s soup, come winter? I didn’t know what was going on with Crete. I didn’t know if it was safe to stay, if I even wanted to stay.

  “And if you’re worried about your job, don’t be,” he said. “Crete’s hired a kid to help Ransome out, and he’s gonna get somebody on part-time at the restaurant. It’ll all sort itself out.” A grim look crossed his face, but I might have imagined it, because then he was smiling again and teasing me about how much I’d eaten and did I want seconds. It was a good sign, he said, my appetite improving.

  I felt woozy the next morning when Birdie came to check the bite. I closed my eyes every time she removed the bandage, because it nauseated me to think about Crete’s mouth on my body, but this time she didn’t put a new bandage on. My visible wounds had healed. I talked to her about how I felt weak and dizzy sometimes when I got up for my shower, and she said it was from spending so much time lying around. The more I got up and about, the better I’d feel, and there was no reason for me to be in bed.

  When Gabby arrived, Carl left to run a few errands. I was feeling better by then. It was her day off, so I knew she had extra time, and I asked if we could go outside.

  “Does Carl approve?” she asked, only partly teasing.

  “Birdie does,” I said. “She says I need the fresh air, need to get used to using my muscles again.”

  She helped me up and we started across the room. “Wait,” she said. “You can’t wear that awful nightgown outdoors. No offense to Mama Dane.”

  “Are my clothes here?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but Carl got you a few things.” She opened the closet and pulled out a simple dress. “It’s secondhand, but that’s all we’ve got in town. If he’d been willing to leave you alone long enough, he would’ve driven down to Mountain Home and bought you some new stuff.”

  Gabby and I sat on the porch swing for a while, just watching clouds inch by. “Can we walk down the road a little?” I asked.

  “Sure, if you’re up to it.”

  We walked slowly, stopping frequently to shake out my secondhand sandals when rocks slipped in between the straps. We hadn’t made it far when I noticed something draped over the barbed-wire fence. As we got closer, I could make out the body of a snake, maybe four feet long, its brown skin patterned with diamonds. I pointed it out to Gabby.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s to make it rain. Old superstition. We had a drought a couple years back, and there was snake jerky hanging all over the place.”

  The smell reached me, and my head swam. I doubled over and threw up in the road.

  “Uh-oh,” Gabby said. “We best get you back to the house.” She took my arm and led me back, making me lie down in bed even though I no longer felt sick.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I think it was just the smell.”

  “Smell wasn’t that bad,” she said. “You should tell Birdie. Could be something’s still not right.”

  “I told her I’ve been feeling weak and dizzy, and she said that’s normal. It’s usually just in the morning, though.”

  Gabby stared at me the way people do when you have a spider on you but they haven’t figured out a good way to tell you.

  “You’re sick in the morning.”

  I nodded. “It doesn’t last. I’m starving by lunch.”

  “Uh-huh. And when was your last period?”

  “My period?” I didn’t know. It had never been regular.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  It was a ridiculous thing for her to say. “No.”

  “But it is possible. And how do you know you’re not?”

  Time stopped as all the different pieces came together. I’d been lulled into a kind of blissful ignorance during my time at Carl’s, had forgotten the pattern my life was following, where it grew shittier at every turn. I’d dreamed of having a new family, but not now, not like this. I could not imagine anything worse at that moment than something growing inside me. I felt too hollow even to summon tears.

  We sat there, and after a while I noticed that Gabby was holding my hand. Carl would be back soon, and I would have one more horrible thing I couldn’t tell him.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Carl’s not like some guys. He won’t be mad. He won’t think you did it on purpose.”

  I didn’t want to tell her it might not be his. I couldn’t bear the thought myself.

  Chapter 17

  Carl

  Carl had trouble sleeping. He’d turn out all the lights downstairs and go around to every window and door, looking outside for a minute or two, each view framed a little different but all the same: dark road, dark field, dark hills. Nobody out there, no thing, nothing. He didn’t know what he expected to see. Joe Bill Sump dragging himself up half-eaten from a hog trough, or his bones all split up like kindling from a long fall down Devil’s Throat? Carl didn’t know where Crete had taken him, where the body was, if there was anything left of it, but Joe Bill was dead and Carl had killed him. The scene replayed in his dreams on an endless loop, a record stuck on a tuneless refrain. His arm pulling back like a piston and shooting forward to smash the words out of Joe Bill’s mouth. The burst of numbness in his knuckles as they struck the jaw with a sharp crack. Joe Bill’s head hitting the wall. The sudden absence of Joe Bill despite his body on the ground. Ransome buzzing in his ear, Get your truck, go! And then he was running, because there was something more important than Joe Bill, and that was making sure Lila was okay.

  The guilt didn’t seep in until later, not until she was under his roof and healing and he knew nothing would hurt her, and then he felt sorry that he’d killed Joe Bill, because he hadn’t meant for it to happen. He also felt guilty for being glad Joe Bill was gone. How could Carl have gone around every day doing normal things, knowing what Sump had done and what he still might do? Knowing that he somehow could get to Lila? He didn’t have to worry about that now, and freed from worry, he had plenty of room for guilt. He could carry that weight. But it made it hard to sleep.

  Crete knew how to dispose of a body. He and Carl had learned from their dad and grandpa, growing up. Dad preferred the respectable way of laying a body to rest, digging a proper grave and tamping it down nice and smooth before the family arrived to mourn. But that wasn’t always what the job called for. Sometimes measures had to be taken to keep things quiet, hidden. The spirit’s fled, Dad would say. Nothing left but a body, and a body without a spirit’ll fall apart whether you help it along or not. Sometimes you did things that disrespected the body, and that was just part of the job. There wasn’t any way around it.

  So Crete had taken care of things. He’d always been a good big brother, protecting Carl from bullies, dragging him out of the river when he got swept up in the current. He made it clear they were there to help each other, it was what brothers did, and he led by example. Joe Bill was gone and so was his truck, and Crete wouldn’t say where. Better you don’t know, he said. He’d kept Joe Bill’s wallet and license plate, and though he didn’t say why, Carl knew. So Crete would have something over him if he needed it. He’d always had that seed of distrust in him, even when it came to his brother. I owe you, Carl had said, and he meant it. He promised Lila that Sump would never touch her again.

  Chapter 18

  Jamie

  Jamie knew the guy in the white van, the one Lucy had seen at Doris Stoddard’s—though even if he hadn’t, he would have lied and said he did, made up a story, anything to keep her with him, alone and in arm’s reach. She’d found Jamie at hi
s fishing spot on the river, and he knew in order to do that, she first would have had to hunt down Gage in whatever hole he was crashing and convince him to give her directions. It was good that she’d gone to some trouble. It meant the information was valuable. Through his years of dealing and bartering, Jamie had developed a knack for knowing how far somebody would go to get something. He could stare right through a person’s eyes to the scale that seesawed in the brain, weighing wants and needs, balancing desire against guilt and pride. Lucy had agreed to his terms without argument. He couldn’t believe his luck, that by virtue of the very life he led, he had something she needed. People needed him all the time in various sharp-edged ways, but not people like Lucy. Lucy would never stumble over him in some dark corner, press her tits in his face, and beg to blow him for meth.

  He’d gotten close to her at the bonfire, as close as he’d ever been, near enough to taste her breath. He’d mentioned Cheri partly to get her attention, but also because he’d been spooked—the memory of it choked him, the rasp of Cheri’s breath as she splashed by, looking right past him without seeing, as though he were the ghost—and he wanted to share it with Lucy, that feeling of not knowing whether he was real or the world around him was real or if anything was real. He knew Lucy would believe him, that she would somehow understand, because he imagined her privy to that spectral world, the realm of unknowable things that existed beyond an invisible sieve, and maybe if he tried hard enough, he could break apart into tiny pieces and sift through to the other side.

  Lucy had pounced on his story, questioning, prodding, taking it seriously, like he’d known she would. But he hadn’t been prepared for her anger. He hadn’t thought to help Cheri as she fled down the river. If anything, he would have asked her for help, asked how to get where ghosts go on earth, how to stay and watch and haunt without anyone knowing he was there. He hadn’t expected Lucy to get so caught up in Cheri that he wouldn’t have the chance to tell her the other, more important story: that he’d met Lucy’s mother at Ralls’ grocery when he was twelve, and she’d cast a spell on him, held him in thrall all these empty years until Lucy emerged from the void.

  Back then, Jamie was the runt of the Petree clan, the scrawniest of all the boys. That was before he got into his present line of work and started benching cinder blocks, before people stopped calling him skinny and started calling him wiry, which was what you called skinny people you didn’t want to mess with. He’d tried to sneak out of Ralls’ with a Mr. Goodbar stuffed down his pants, but Junior Ralls had grabbed him by the shirt collar, his calloused knuckles scraping the back of Jamie’s neck. Jamie played dumb, which wasn’t much of an act; as a kid, he often didn’t know what people expected of him or how he’d failed to meet their expectations, which he inevitably seemed to do. Junior shook Jamie back and forth, hissing in his face, Answer me, boy, why you think your white-trash ass can get away with stealing.

  Then an angel appeared, the lights of the dairy cooler bending around her like an aura. She looked right into his eyes, and he saw himself mirrored there, a stupid kid with a candy bar sticking out of the waist of his hand-me-down Wranglers; his mom would never buy him a Mr. Goodbar no matter how hard he begged, because her holy-roller stepfather had whipped her into believing everything good was evil, including chocolate, soda, and birthdays. The woman, Lila, paid for the candy, allowing Junior to pluck the coins from her outstretched palm. Junior let go of Jamie’s collar, and Jamie saw the way the grocer gawked at the woman, his mouth gone slack, and he knew Lila’s power wasn’t in his imagination. It slowly came to him that she was no angel. Angels didn’t show so much cleavage or smile at the likes of him. No, she was something else entirely. Long hair gleaming like a blackbird’s wings and eyes like a wolf’s, sharp and beautiful and full of secrets. He’d jacked off to that image uncountable times. He had run straight home from the grocery store, in fact, and humped the bathroom rug. Later, when he learned her name, he’d moan it in time with the stroke of his hand. Lila, Liiilaaa. Savoring the undulation of the tongue, the exotic taste of her name in his mouth.

  His mother heard him and thought sure he was possessed. She started telling people that Lila Petrovich, the trampy new waitress at Dane’s, was some kind of old-world witch. Beneath that disguise of comely flesh and shiny hair, she was probably covered in hundred-year-old wrinkles and warts. The witch had done something to her boy, had crept close enough to enthrall him, and now he was trapped in her magic, helpless as a fly in molasses. Jamie had believed it, too. Lila had cast a spell to make sure no other woman would ever measure up. And none had, not until Lucy arrived at the bonfire, grown up, blood and flesh warming the shape of his memory, her eyes identical to Lila’s save for the way they assessed him. He longed for her to look at him the way Lila had, to take him in, but Lucy’s eyes locked him out.

  He’d started dreaming of Lila again the night he met Lucy at the river party. She was so real in his dreams, as she always had been, but now she didn’t smile and hold out her hand, as she had done so many times in the past. She was trying to tell him something that he couldn’t understand, her words rising soundlessly like bubbles underwater. Her eyes, though, were clear as ever, and when he looked into them, he was twelve years old again, and she was saving him from Junior Ralls, his scrawny body flooded with relief.

  Lila was the one in his dreams, but when he woke, it was thoughts of Lucy that lingered. He’d been trying to figure out how to see her again ever since the party. Now Lucy had hunted him down, tracked him to this remote fishing spot, and stood before him on the riverbank, her arms crossed over her chest, waiting. She had questions for him, about Cheri and the van, and they had struck a deal. I’ll tell you what I know, he’d said. If you kiss me. One kiss. I start it, I finish it.

  Chapter 19

  Lucy

  I was grateful that Jamie was willing to tell me what he knew, even if it was for a price. He moved closer, his stringy hair hanging in his face, and I steeled myself for what was coming. I tried to pretend he was an ordinary guy from school, not a drug dealer a dozen years older than me. It wasn’t the wisest choice I’d made, to come here alone without telling anyone, but I didn’t want to have to explain myself, the things I was willing to do to get what I wanted. I’d never imagined myself as the sort of person who’d use my body in trade. But I was starting to think you were one kind of person until a situation arose that required you to be something else. It didn’t mean that I was on the road to ruin. It just meant that I would do what I had to. You didn’t wait for snakes to come out of their den, according to Birdie. You poured the den full of gasoline.

  It was only a kiss, I reminded myself. That was all he’d asked, though not all he wanted. I could feel that much in the air between us.

  “Just get it over with,” I said.

  He leaned in, his breath sour. The breeze brushed his long hair against my arms, and I smelled his sweating body, acrid and earthy like burning leaves. He watched me for a long minute, his hand reaching up and smoothing my hair, trailing across my cheekbone. I kept my expression detached, tried not to shudder. His eyes stayed open as he tilted his head, pressed his lips against mine. He pulled back slightly to look at me again, and I thought he was done. It had been nothing, an instant of touching skin. Then his mouth was hard on mine, wet and open. I shrank away from him and he caged his arms around me, locking me in place. I tried to stay calm and focus on why I was doing this. I let my mouth soften and he pushed his way in. He tasted like smoke and liquor and an underlying bitterness I couldn’t identify. He loosened his grip and his hands traveled tentatively over my body, barely grazing the sides of my breasts, and then drawing my hips firmly against his. Tendrils of fear curled up my spine. I had placed my trust in a criminal and in my own belief that I could protect myself. He pushed himself against me more insistently, and for the first time, I gave in to thoughts of what would happen if he shoved me to the ground, held me down. I would fight him, of course, but I wasn
’t sure I would win.

  I risked his anger by pulling away, slowly this time, and he opened his eyes, dazed. Before I could say anything, he pressed his cheek to mine and spoke softly into my ear. Had anyone been watching, we might have looked like lovers embracing.

  “Name’s Emory,” he said. “Don’t know if that’s first or last. Hear he’s got a place up on Caney Mountain, but I’ve never seen it and neither’ll you. Dogs’d eat you first. He sells things. Drugs, guns. A friend of mine told me a while back Emory was selling people. Girls. You remember Eldon Johnson? Found dead underneath his deer stand, everybody figured he got drunk and fell and broke his neck. Wouldn’t be unlike him. I believe your dad laid him to rest in his parents’ pasture. Eldon was the one flapping his mouth about Emory.”

  Jamie nuzzled my hair and inhaled, long and deep, before letting me go. “People think I’m nuts,” he said, squinting at me like I hurt his eyes. “But I got enough sense to fear all the right things.”

  I knew he was referring to Emory, that I should stay away, but I wondered if that was also why he let me go instead of taking what he wanted. If he feared my family would come after him, bury him in an unmarked grave. Or if he still thought there might be something to those witch rumors. My legs trembled but held. I resisted the urge to turn and see if he was watching me walk away. My breathing didn’t return to normal until I’d put some distance between us, and even then I could still taste him, his bitterness mingled with fear in my throat.

  Daniel’s face turned new shades of red when I told him what I’d done. I considered not telling him at all, then settled for a tamer version of the truth, so I wouldn’t have to lie outright if it somehow got around that Jamie had kissed me.